Look for Me in Melodies
by litvirg
Summary: Bellamy wakes up blindfolded and bound to a chair. He doesn't know where he is. The last thing he remembers was Clarke on his shoulder, too tired to run, before everything went black. (Companion piece to "Remember Me in Colors" but can be read alone.)


He woke up blindfolded. His wrists were bound behind him, tied to the chair he was in and he was sure if he looked down at his feet he would see the same. He tried kicking out his leg and felt the scrape of the rope against his skin.

He was gagged. The thick material restricted his breathing and he heard his breath hiss in and out of his nose, like the snare drum the grounders played as they marched on their camp for the first time.

He wasn't sure how many people were in the room. At least two others—they spoke to each other in the grounder tongue, but he may not have been the only prisoner they may have gotten—

_Clarke_.

He remembered the strike to the head and collapsing on the ground, dragging Clarke down with him. They couldn't have both of them, the camp needed Clarke, she was their leader, she was—

He heard the one of the grounders shush another, noticing he was awake and struggling.

(He had to get out, he could break the ropes, he had to get out).

He heard the steady beat of footsteps come his way. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

And then one memory of a whispered _"Fool,"_ before everything faded away.

When he woke again he made sure not to move. He wanted to hear what they were saying, hear who they were.

But he couldn't. He didn't understand the grounder language and it all just sounded like a jumble of sounds, nonsense, something a little kid would make up. But he needed to focus, to hear something. He might be able to pick up on a word or two if he tried. The rest he wasn't sure of. He needed Octavia for this.

_"Think of it like music," Clarke whispered in his ear once. (It was a meeting with the grounders. He was frustrated, growing red, muscles coiling into a knot. Clarke saw and started tapping a pattern out on his fist). "The notes don't speak like words do, but you still understand what they're saying."_

He tried. He remembered the beat she pushed into his hand, and started tapping it out himself. He steadied his breathing to it to calm himself down. Then he listened in.

_"Speed is important. Focus on how fast they are," she pressed her fingers firmly into his skin. "Do they match my pace?"_

The grounders in front of him were faster. He tapped a little quicker. Faster still. Their words were whizzing by him, a flash of light too fast to see, a string of words too quick to translate. He wouldn't be able to pick out a word even if he knew it.

They're fast, he wanted to tell her. Too fast. What does fast mean? When the notes go whizzing by before you have a chance to properly hear them? What are they saying to you then?

_"Speed means excitement, or urgency. Or fear. You have to listen to the tone to figure out which."_

He was trying, he really was. He wanted to understand, to hear their tone, to figure out what they were saying without having to hear what they were saying.

But all he could hear was Clarke's ragged breath as he threw her over his shoulder. Her voice, like tin, trying to call out him to warn him about the grounders moving in, surrounding them. Her cry of pain as they both went down.

His heart was racing, thumping against his rib cage, pounding out a beat that was getting faster and faster as he remembered how limp her body was as he lifted it. He tried to slow down, to control his breathing but he couldn't. He couldn't remember how he was supposed to breathe, all he could hear was Clarke's breath huffing out next to his ear and he pushed further on and on and on, until he couldn't tell the difference between the memory of Clarke's breathing and his own anymore.

The next time he woke up, the blindfold was off. He spun his head back and forth looking for a sign of someone, anyone.

Clarke.

But he was alone.

It was a small room. Room wasn't exactly a great term for it, it was more of a hole. A hovel. It had dirt floors and walls, one entryway.

(One exit way.)

His hands and feet were still bound, his mouth was still gagged.

Footsteps were coming toward the doorway. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

A pause.

He heard a grounder shouting down the hallway to another.

Slow. Not urgent. But loud and aggressive. Mad.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

Eight beats. Eight beats it took for the grounder to make it from wherever he was to the doorway. Four more and he made it to just in front of Bellamy's chair.

He squinted down at him, a low grunt escaping his lips before he turned away and shouted something out the door. He moved beside Bellamy, as someone else started down the hallway.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

In the doorway stood a woman, tall and sharp like Anya was. Her skin was dark and muddy, and her hair was gray. It was pulled up into a sleek ponytail, a style he had not seen the grounders use.

Bellamy recognized the similarities between the grounders and his own people. Their clothes were much of the same now that they had been on the Earth for a while. They ate the same food, constructed homes in the same way.

Their languages were different, and while the grounders stuck to their traditions, Bellamy's people seemed to be constantly breaking away from theirs.

This woman looked as if she had one foot in each camp.

"It seems one of my own took it upon himself to order your capture." She glanced at the man standing next to Bellamy and he backed away. She took the knife from her belt and walked behind him, slicing through his binds, before walking back around. "Tell me, what were you doing inside my clan's borders?"

She had a thick accent. Clarke had tried to teach him the sounds of the accents when he couldn't pick up on the languages Octavia had tried to teach him. Her t's sounded like th's. Where did Clarke say that saw from?

"Answer me." She ordered.

"Hunting," he grunted out.

The north, he thought. Clarke told him that that accent hailed from the north. She was new here, then.

"And where is you companion? My man said there were two of you."

Bellamy growled and look up at her. His breathing was ragged and heavy again, and he felt a fire coursing through him, pushing and pulling at his ribs, clenching his lungs.

"Why don't you tell me?" he spat.

If they had Clarke, he would know. He would find out, he'd be able to tell.

The man a few feet from him grumbled something.

_"Grumbling means they're ashamed," Clarke had told him. "Not so different from us, see?"_

He didn't know what the man was saying, but the woman let out a bark of laughter.

"Your clan has a fierce leader, I see," she said.

Bellamy said nothing.

"It seems your woman took out one of my own men, and stole one of our horses. She might still be out there, my men never caught her."

_"I don't have to tell you the sound a lie makes_."

She was telling the truth. Clarke was out there, she had ridden away, but now he was stuck in here with no way to get out. To get to her.

"She's not my woman. She's my leader."

The woman smiled. "One and the same." With a wave of her hand, she dismissed the guard from Bellamy's side, and kneeled down in front of him.

"My men were mistaken in launching an attack, by my best tracker is injured because of your woman. It seems as though we are at a stand still."

Bellamy laughed at that, but snapped his mouth shut quickly. He didn't like his laugh sounding like that. The last time he had laughed was days ago, after Clarke had said—

It didn't matter now.

"Blood must be paid with blood right?" he asked. Then he pulled aside the hair that had fallen on his forehead, revealing his scar from the two times he had been knocked out. "This debt has already been paid."

The woman chuckled and he winced.

"Very well."

He was bound and gagged and blindfolded again. Then he was thrown over the back of a horse being led by someone else, unsure of where he was being taken.

He listened. He heard the whistling of the wind through the trees and the trickling of the river over the rocks. They couldn't be too far from camp if he could hear the river.

_"It's kind of amazing, isn't it?" Clarke had said to him once, stopping at a far dip in the river. "How the same river sounds so different depending on where you are."_

The sound of the river got a bit further away and then suddenly he was dumped off the side of the horse and landing with a resounding _whump_ in the dirt.

Creaking. He heard creaking. A gate opening. Footsteps running out toward him, stopping at his head. Hands brushing against his blindfold lifting it off.

"Hey, big brother." Octavia smiled down at him. "Long time no see."

Octavia took him to the drop ship they were back to using as a med bay. His head was heavy and it ached and it felt better if he closed his eyes but even with his eyes closed he knew something was wrong.

It sounded all wrong.

Octavia was bellowing orders from where she was beside him, but people were moving slower. He couldn't hear the usual bustle in the med bay, the exchange of tools, of medicine. Quick conversations started lasting longer and longer and one important noise was missing. Without it the noises all sounded jumbled and he couldn't make sense of them.

"Where's Clarke?" He moved himself up on his elbows before Octavia shoved him back down so she could treat his wound.

Octavia's face scrunched up. "We thought she was with you."

He shot straight up at that, ears ringing like an alarm in his head. "She's not back?" Octavia shook her head. "How long?"

"It's been a week, Bell. Neither of you came back from the hunt."

Octavia made him stay in the med bay for two days. She wanted to be sure he was fine, that he wasn't having any delayed symptoms of—well, anything. She checked on him twice every hour, positive that she was going to find him in pain, but he was fine.

He needed to get out of the med bay, it was giving him a headache. He couldn't listen to it anymore, it was wrong, it was all wrong and he needed to leave, to listen to something else, the husky scraping of a builders knife on wood, the faint trill of an arrow shooting into a target, anything else.

(The voices of his people volunteering to form a search party).

(The shout of the arrival of someone at the gate).

But Octavia sent him to his tent and all he heard was silence.

He spent twelve nights lying awake in his tent figuring out exactly what noises make up the silence that buried him.

There was the rustle of his blankets as he constantly shifted back and forth and back and forth.

There was the sounds of footsteps clomping past, patrolling the camp in shifts, giving the camp a steady heartbeat. _Thudump. Thudmp. Thudump._

An inconsistent burst of wind rattles his tent, shaking the fabric.

The crickets in the trees just beyond their borders.

The frogs in the river.

The pattering of rodent feet, scraping up the tree bark. The shaking of the branches as they search for food.

The crackle of the fire in the middle of their camp.

The sound of Miller giving soft orders, reluctant to take up his spot as Bellamy's co-leader.

(The sound of the breath leaving his lungs every time he hears someone at the gate and the sound of his hand smacking the fabric of his tent every time it's not her).

The sounds piled on top of him and he hears nothing, but he is buried beneath their noise, drowning in silence because one voice was still missing.

Eleven more days passed in suffocating silence.

Then noise flooded his ears.

"Open the gates!"

He heard the wood creak open, and then he heard her laughing, and she was there on the other side of the gate, caked in mud and colors and sound and his feet pounded out a rhythm on the dirt as he ran over to her and he memorized the sound of her breath as he wrapped his arms around her.

"Don't do that again, Princess," he whispered in her ear, breaking his own silence, and then all he heard was her.


End file.
